About

Making Meaning

Making Meaning is a gathering to explore new perspectives on collage’s history and current approaches to curating, publishing, and making. Through presentations, panels, workshops, and exhibitions, the symposium will:

  • Bring together artists, curators, publishers, and historians to create new cross-disciplinary dialogue and connections.

  • Reconsider collage history as expansive and inclusive—woven through artmaking across time and diverse communities.

  • Explore the intersections of collage with painting, sculpture, photography, design, and other creative practices.

  • Elevate collage as an important mode of thinking and making—emphasizing the relevance of deconstruction, fragmentation, and connection as processes for understanding contemporary life.

Photo: Alison Owen

Transforming Collage

Transforming Collage is an artist-led collective founded by Andrea Burgay and Monica Church. The collective supports projects that explore collage as a conceptually, materially, and socially transformative practice.

Andrea Burgay is a visual artist, publisher, and curator. She focuses on collage-based works and collaborative projects that investigate paper and print media as sites of connection, exploring cycles of destruction and renewal through their transformation. She is the founder and editor of Cut Me Up Magazine, a curatorial project in which readers respond to published artworks by reimagining and reconfiguring them, creating an ongoing visual dialogue among artists.

Monica Church is a visual artist and curator. She focusses on the continuum between collage and painting. Her work combines passages of color and delineated shapes with physical materials like found papers,  sail material, and ephemera. In some pieces she emphasizes structural materials and in others, surface activity and color space. Monica studied printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design, has a B.A. in visual arts from Bennington College and an M.F.A. in painting from The University of Kentucky. 

Making Meaning logo and marketing materials designed by allison anne